Google – MindShifthttps://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift
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88007858How Has Google Affected The Way Students Learn?https://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2016/02/08/how-has-google-affected-the-way-students-learn/
https://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2016/02/08/how-has-google-affected-the-way-students-learn/#commentsMon, 08 Feb 2016 08:42:58 +0000http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/?p=43662Take a look at this question: How do modern novels represent the characteristics of humanity?

If you were tasked with answering it, what would your first step be? Would you scribble down your thoughts — or would you Google it?

Terry Heick, a former English teacher in Kentucky, had a surprising revelation when his eighth- and ninth-grade students quickly turned to Google.

“What they would do is they would start Googling the question, ‘How does a novel represent humanity?’ ” Heick says. “That was a real eye-opener to me.”

For those of us who grew up with search engines, especially Google, at our fingertips — looking at all of you millennials and post-millennials — this might seem intuitive. We grew up having our questions instantly answered as long as we had access to the Internet.

Now, with the advent of personal assistants like Siri and Google Now that aim to serve up information before you even know you need it, you don’t even need to type the questions. Just say the words and you’ll have your answer.

But with so much information easily available, does it make us smarter? Compared to the generations before who had to adapt to the Internet, how are those who grew up using the Internet — the so-called “Google generation” — different?

Heick had intended for his students to take a moment to think, figure out what type of information they needed, how to evaluate the data and how to reconcile conflicting viewpoints. He did not intend for them to immediately Google the question, word by word — eliminating the process of critical thinking.

More Space To Think Or Less Time To Think?

There is a relative lack of research available examining the effect of search engines on our brains even as the technology is rapidly dominating our lives. Of the studies available, the answers are sometimes unclear.

Some argue that with easy access to information, we have more space in our brain to engage in creative activities, as humans have in the past.

Whenever new technology emerges — including newspapers and television — discussions about how it will threaten our brainpower always crops up, Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker wrote in a 2010 op-ed in The New York Times. Instead of making us stupid, he wrote, the Internet and technology “are the only things that will keep us smart.”

Daphne Bavelier, a professor at the University of Geneva, wrote in 2011 that we may have lost the ability for oral memorization valued by the Greeks when writing was invented, but we gained additional skills of reading and text analysis.

Writer Nicholas Carr contends that the Internet will take away our ability for contemplation due to the plasticity of our brains. He wrote about the subject in a 2008 article for The Atlantic titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid.”

“… what the [Internet] seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation,” Carr wrote.

The few studies available, however, do not seem to bode well for the Google generation.

A 2008 study commissioned by the British Library found that young people go through information online very quickly without evaluating it for accuracy.

A 2011 study in the journal Science showed that when people know they have future access to information, they tend to have a better memory of how and where to find the information — instead of recalling the information itself.

That phenomenon is similar to not remembering your friend’s birthday because you know you can find it on Facebook. When we know that we can access this information whenever we want, we are not motivated to remember it.

‘I’m Always On My Computer’

Michele Nelson, an art teacher at Estes Hills Elementary School in Chapel Hill, N.C., seems to share Carr’s concerns. Nelson, who has been teaching for more than nine years, says it was obvious with her middle school students and even her 15-year-old daughter that they are unable to read long texts anymore.

“They just had a really hard time comprehending if they went to a website that had a lot of information,” Nelson says. “They couldn’t grasp it, they couldn’t figure out what the important thing was.”

Nelson says she struggles with the same problem.

“I’m always on my computer. … I don’t read books as much as I used to,” she says. “It’s a lot harder for my brain to get to a place where I can follow and enjoy the reading, and I get distracted very easily.”

The bright side lies in a 2009 study conducted by Gary Small, the director of University of California Los Angeles’ Longevity Center, that explored brain activity when older adults used search engines. He found that among older people who have experience using the Internet, their brains are two times more active than those who don’t when conducting Internet searches.

Internet searching, Small says, is like a brain exercise that can be good for our mental health.

“If somebody has normal memory when they’re older, I always encourage them to use the computer,” he says. “It enhances our lives.”

For Small, the problem for younger people is the overuse of the technology that leads to distraction. Otherwise, he is excited for the new innovations in technology.

“We tend to be economical in terms of how we use our brain, so if you know you don’t have to memorize the directions to a certain place because you have a GPS in your car, you’re not going to bother with that,” Small says. “You’re going to use your mind to remember other kinds of information.”

How To Teach Digital Natives?

Heick has since left teaching to start TeachThought, a company that produces content to support teachers in “innovation in teaching and learning for a 21st century audience.”

To him, the Internet holds great potential for education — but curriculum must change accordingly. Since content is so readily available, teachers should not merely dole out information and instead focus on cultivating critical thinking, he says.

“Classroom walls and school building walls are transparent, with technology essentially bringing the outside world to the classroom and vice versa,” he says.

Heick says his company recently started working with schools and organizations in a few states, including North Carolina, Texas and New York, to develop lesson plans.

“Google really lubricates that access to information and while that is fantastic, it makes us have to change a bit the way we think about things,” Heick says. “Because we’re so busy, we have this false security that we understand something because we Googled it. Now we’re moving on to the next thing instead of really rolling around with this idea and trying to understand it.”

One of his recommendations is to make questions “Google-proof.”

“Design it so that Google is crucial to creating a response rather than finding one,” he writes in his company’s blog. “If students can Google answers — stumble on (what) you want them to remember in a few clicks — there’s a problem with the instructional design.”

Meanwhile, teenagers are also aware of how the Internet is taking ahold of their lives. Caitlyn Nelson, teacher Michele Nelson’s daughter, finds it hard to focus when she is forced to do readings or even exams online. Like most teenagers, sometimes she finds herself surfing the Web when she’s supposed to be reading PowerPoint slides in class.

Caitlyn talks about a video they watched in English class about the impact of technology.

“We talked about how technology is changing … how most people are basically becoming zombies and slaves to the Internet because that’s all we can do,” she says.

“I feel really bad that I’m connected to my phone all the time instead of talking to my mom. But she’s also addicted to her phone.”

As one of the biggest, most successful tech companies, Google can hire pretty much anyone it wants.

Accordingly, the company tends to favor Ph.D.s from Stanford and MIT. But, it has just partnered with a for-profit company called General Assembly to offer a series of short, non-credit courses for people who want to learn how to build applications for Android, Google’s mobile platform. Short, as in just 12 weeks from novice to employable.

This is just one of a slew of big announcements this fall coming out of a peculiar, fast-growing corner of the higher education world: the coder bootcamp. This is really an entire new industry within higher ed that’s grown up in about five years.

Bootcamps are designed to teach cutting-edge technical skills like being a web developer or a mobile-app developer. Charging between $10,000 and $20,000 for tuition, with no previous experience required, in the course of just three to six months they promise to make participants highly employable in a lucrative and fast-growing industry.

As the industry grows, there are still a lot of unanswered questions, notably about ensuring quality and honesty in reporting of statistics like job placement. (A recent survey by an organization called Course Report says 66 percent of bootcamp graduates are employed in a related field and that they experienced a 38 percent salary bump on average.)

Still, the sector has attracted attention not just from major employers like Google, but from startup private education lenders, the big for-profit education companies and, not surprisingly, from regulators within the Department of Education as well.

For more thoughts on the future of tech-skills education and skills training more generally, I called up Jake Schwartz, CEO of General Assembly — one of the emerging leaders in this new sector.

Schwartz didn’t expect to go into the education business, much less start “a global educational institution.” In 2011, he and cofounders Adam Pritzker, Matthew Brimer and Brad Hargreaves opened a co-working space in Manhattan, where startup companies could rent desk space and share resources and networking opportunities.

To help pay the rent, they started holding workshops at night on topics like web design. Today they have 14 campuses in seven countries.

How did the new collaboration with Google arise? What are they getting out of this?

Android is one of the fastest growing platforms in the world — they have a billion users worldwide. We released a jobs report this summer with Burning Glass showing that demand for mobile developers has grown by over 150 percent in the last five years. I’m pumped that Google wanted to do this with us.

How heavily involved was Google in helping you develop these programs?

They made introductions, offered input on best practices, collaborated on the curriculum and contributed devices for students to use. And I expect they’ll continue to be involved and to offer networking opportunities to students.

So, this makes me think of how, in a previous generation, a community college may have helped trained welders to work in the local factory. Do you all see yourselves as the technical-skills providers for a new industry and a new generation?

This is not a new idea — I’m sure Detroit was filled with these kinds of programs back in the day. GE and AT&T had their own college campuses where new hires and employees would spend weeks at a time. They were making massive investments in training. And as average employee tenure went down, these investments also decreased.

We focus on the students first, but we see this as a two-sided market, addressing the needs of both companies and employees.

Right, and let me make clear that your program isn’t training people to work directly for Google, necessarily. Android developers instead work for companies making apps that use Google’s Android operating system. You call it an ecosystem.

Yes. The No. 1 thing they hear from their developer network is, I need more developers!

So for Google it’s a great opportunity to do stuff for that ecosystem and build their platform at the same time.

Anything that brings the employers and corporate ecosystem closer to educators is a positive thing.

So, now that the job market is more competitive, more loosely joined, and more entrepreneurial than it was in the past, you see yourselves as helping close the skills gap? And that’s a role that might have been filled by a public institution previously?

We’ve been doing all sorts of partnerships with forward-thinking institutions: with Colgate University, Wharton Business School, the New School. We have a bunch in the pipeline. I would put them all in the experimental stage — I don’t think we’ve landed on a single model yet.

What I love generally is, most institutions that are talking to us realize that they need to serve their students. It’s part of the value proposition that enables them to compete and differentiate in the 21st century.

What really strikes me about what you guys are doing is that, when we think of innovation and the role of technology in higher education, most of the time people think about online education, predictive analytics and other gadgets. But the innovation represented by programs like General Assembly is different: It’s because the tech industry imposes the need for people to update skills so quickly that you’ve created this model that is as fast as possible — which means being face-to-face, having a low student-teacher ratio — and that works so closely with industry to update curricula and offerings as fast as needed.

You nailed it.

And you’ve also grown by marketing directly to the student, who pays retail, instead of traditional higher education which has lots of other stakeholders and payers involved, like lenders and the federal government.

I’m really hoping and pushing and making a lot of moves to hopefully innovate on the model in higher ed, to create better more sustainable solutions that don’t call in all the weird perverse incentives and bizarre power dynamics.

Can you give an example?

We want to objectively report all our numbers: How much people paid and how they did in the job market. It’s such a good way of not manipulating the potential indicators of risk and reward.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

]]>https://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2015/11/03/what-the-future-of-tech-skills-education-could-look-like/feed/542660Google Glass: Vision for Future of Learning?https://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/05/14/google-glass-vision-for-future-of-learning/
https://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/05/14/google-glass-vision-for-future-of-learning/#commentsTue, 14 May 2013 21:00:48 +0000http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/?p=28757This is a shamelessly promotional video for Google Glass, but it shows the possibilities this tool opens up for learners. Andrew Vanden Heuvel teaches advanced physics online to high school students whose schools don’t offer the course. He explores CERN, the famous particle physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, bringing it back into the classroom in real time with Google glasses.

]]>https://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/05/14/google-glass-vision-for-future-of-learning/feed/228757Project Glass: Google’s Augmented Reality Experimenthttps://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2012/07/31/project-glass-googles-augmented-reality-experiment/
https://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2012/07/31/project-glass-googles-augmented-reality-experiment/#respondTue, 31 Jul 2012 15:00:18 +0000http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/?p=22238We’ve talked about how augmented reality can be used as a learning tool. Now see how Google’s budding Project Glass takes us a few giant leaps into the future.

Students rely heavily on ranking–or how search tools decide the order in which to display results–to help them select sources to read. Most of us do, but the data about students comes from researchers Andrew Asher of Bucknell University and Lynda Duke of Illinois Wesleyan University.

The researchers presented the findings of their latest study and forthcoming paper on how university students do research, at the American Library Association Annual conference, and in the talk they emphasized some of their takeaways about what research skills should look like, including an overall focus on critical thinking skills and the ability to evaluate the quality of sources.

Because of the reliance on ranking, Asher and Duke argue, it’s critical for students to have some understanding of how each search tool they use makes these decisions.

To that end, here are a few resources to help understand and communicate with students about how Google ranks search results. Understanding the fundamentals of ranking will help students write better queries and make better choices about where to click.

This video, How Search Works by Matt Cutts gives a nice overview of how items are ranked.

To dig even deeper, check out the monthly posts on the Inside Search blog that cover the changes made to improve search quality. Here, you can see results to the query [site:insidesearch.blogspot.com intitle:”search quality highlights” ranking], which uses a site: operator to limit results to pages within the Inside Search blog and uses an “intitle”: operator to limit to posts that have the phrase “search quality highlights” in the title. If you click on the link, you can also note that the time filters in the left-hand side of the screen are set to show articles just from the past year, and that the articles are sorted by date so you can look at the changes in order, starting with the most recent.

Google has launched a new site called Search Education aimed at educators who want to teach online search strategies.

The site includes lesson plans geared at different levels of expertise — beginner, intermediate and advanced— as well as training videos that walk through different strategies for subjects like using Creative Commons and Google maps.

For each topic, lessons for every level of searcher goes into deep detail, offering background explanations of how search works the way it does, specific examples of search words and their results, and numerous tips. There’s also a short quiz at the end of each lesson.

The lessons are aligned with the Common Core Curriculum Standards and refer to the K-12 College and Career Readiness (CCR) Anchor Standards. According to Google, the lessons are not intended to comprise a whole research unit, but to be integrated into various units as they fit to individual educators’ needs.

Some methods are designed for starting from a specific question or exercise, while others are for created to launch from a topic.

The site also features A Google A Day lessons for daily search exercises, as well as a Lesson Plan Map that shows an overarching guide to how to use the site based on factors like level, knowledge, and skills.

Google Books can help with this. What’s needed is the information that appears in a citation: the author, place, and date of publication. Luckily, traditional print materials (in the form of books) often include the kind of citation information you might need and Google Books allow you to search the full text of books.

This is where the search gets tricky. Why did the book itself not come up in the original Google Books results? From experience, I know that famous quotes and other texts tend to change as they spread. As Dan Russell wrote in his SearchReSearch post about misquoting:

“Misquotation and missed attributions happen all the time. ALL the time. Even people you think would get it right–say, JFK, who was a prolific re-quoter of others and had a speech-writing staff to boot–often got the attributions wrong.”

When verifying a quote, you should not assume that you have the saying verbatim–you never know what words have been added or subtracted by someone along the way. Once again, the best practice is to pick out the key words that best define what you seek. Google ranks results, in part, by whether your search terms are close to each other, and in the same order, on a page. So, when trying to locate a specific passage, it works best to pick a phrase rather than individual words.

I look for a combination that I don’t imagine would appear any place but in the item I want to find. For example, I pick the start of the book title (Wouldn’t Take Nothing) and a unique and striking string of words from the quote (“diversity makes for a rich tapestry”). When I locate the book, click through to the profile page, and use the ‘Search in this book’ box in the left-hand column, I again enter the unique portion of the quote:Not only do I find the saying in question, but I discover that the version I started with, while widely quoted, included an extra word: along the way, someone had added the “what” in “no matter what their color.”

As it turns out, that one little word slowed me down. Had I simply started with Maya Angelou diversity makes for a rich tapestry, I would have found her book directly. But, since I used a quote that had words she didn’t use, and put quotation marks around it to require a precise match, Maya Angelou’s book didn’t appear as a result.

Despite this misstep, end-to-end, it has taken less than two minutes to locate and verify the source of the quote.

The primary tactic I used here is called scoping. Scoping is when you limit the sources you’re searching to a set of a particular kind. Google Books, Google News, Google Images, and Google Scholar are examples of ways to scope within Google. Or, if you want primary sources on Abraham Lincoln, using a search like [site:loc.gov lincoln] to limit results to pages from the Library of Congress’ website is another type of scoping.

The power of scoping is one of the reasons Google Books is so efficient. I recommend Google Books in a wide variety of circumstances — for example:

Someone on Google+ asked for “…examples of the medieval motif of dancers trapped/stuck in a dance together.” I had no name for this motif by which to look it up, and no idea what the question even meant until I found scholarly sources discussing an example which then, with help from a blog post, led to more examples, also from Google Books.

Previewing books to assure they’re a good fit to a student’s reading level before requesting them from another library:

A student interested in Rube Goldberg’s comic criticisms of the mechanical age was interested in reading Michael North’s Machine-Age Comedy, but found from the preview that the reading level was not a good match for her needs. This kept her from stalling on her homework for several days while waiting for the book to arrive from the library, and encouraged her to check out a different book, instead.

In some of these cases, some fancy searching was involved (stay tuned for more about locating gun-runners, witches, and hippies another day). In most of these cases, however, a very straightforward Google Books search, such as typing the title of the book or story into the basic Google Books search box, uncovered the hoped-for source instantly.

The takeaway: if you want information about something that originally appeared in print, remember to try Google Books.

Have something you read once upon a time and would like to locate again? Give Google Books a try!

]]>https://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2012/03/07/cant-confirm-that-quotation-search-google-books/feed/0196685850843605_059756c6c6Search by Color? A Little-Known Trick to Find the Right Imagehttps://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2012/02/02/search-by-color-a-little-known-trick-to-find-the-right-image/
https://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2012/02/02/search-by-color-a-little-known-trick-to-find-the-right-image/#commentsThu, 02 Feb 2012 15:00:38 +0000http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/?p=18791Continue reading Search by Color? A Little-Known Trick to Find the Right Image→]]>

Flickr: Richard Morton

By Tasha Bergson-Michelson

At its heart, clever searching lies at the intersection of critical thinking, imagination, and the savvy use of technical tools. Google Search Educator Tasha Bergson-Michelson begins a series of guest posts about innovative ways to approach finding information and the problems we can solve when we bring together technology, creativity, and education.

It’s right before bedtime on Sunday night, and your child just announced that she has a report due in the morning about heroes. Excited by the Super Bowl, she wants to write about teamwork among her personal heroes, the New England Patriots. Off she goes to Google to find some inspirational pictures of the Patriots in action.

When searching for the New England Patriots, you get a variety of images–but many of them logos, or fan created photo montages on a background of the team colors. If you actually want a screen full of pictures of people playing the game, what are your options?

Looking at this first screen of results, considering what to do next, a savvy searcher asks what pictures of people actually playing football would all have in common.

One picture above immediately catches the eye: the green photo in the third row. You can tell that it is a picture of a game because of the grass on the field. In fact, most action shots in a game should have a background of turf. So, what if there was a way to tell Google to deliver only images with grassy backgrounds?

Take a look at the left-hand side of the screen. Near the bottom, there is a series of colored boxes. These are filters that allow you to find pictures of a particular color. By clicking on the green box, you can essentially tell Google to return pictures with a lot of grass:

You might be surprised at the scholarly contexts in which color filtering becomes a powerful search tactic. By itself color filtering might seem like a niche feature, but looking at a few practical applications can get your creative juices flowing as you think about problems it might solve for you.

Let’s take another example. Consider an approach one librarian discovered when working with her school’s science teachers. Run an Image Search for tesla coil and you will find:

But say that what you really want is a diagram of how a tesla coil works. What is a common factor of such diagrams? In looking carefully at the images above, you may notice that most are dark, with bright, purple arcs. Diagrams, on the other hand, tend to have mostly black writing on a white background. So, click on the white color filter:

Now, all of a sudden, your results are primarily diagrams and other technical details. Voila!

These searches are examples of a broader strategy called predictive search, in which you winnow down to your best results by anticipating their common factors. Google search allows you to specify common factors by color or terms, but also by characteristics like language, medium, or geographical or chronological features, in order to narrow down to exactly what you need. Once you see how you can think creatively about the defining characteristics of the information you want, you can become truly powerful at finding what you need.

Future posts will explore unexpected applications of everyday Google tools to solve problems even faster and more effectively.

One final example of how color filtering can improve both academic research and daily life: Have you ever read a book, and later remembered the subject and something about the cover, but not the title itself? For example, say you were wondering, “What was that book about Lewis and Clark I looked at the other day–that red one with the canoe on the cover?”

Simply search for [Lewis Clark book] in Google Images:

And filter for red images:

This method works whether you are trying to identify that full title you forgot to write down for your works cited list, or locating a gift for that special someone, when you can’t remember the title, but have just a general idea of the topic and remember that great shade of red.

Often people think of searching in words, but don’t consider the other elements that they know identify their answers. A little creativity in making use of what you know can find you more than you ever dreamed.

The main Google in Education link offers much of the same content as before, but it’s better organized and redesigned. The Teachers site leads to Google’s many apps that can be used for teaching specific subjects, as well as design and collaboration tools. It’s divided by K-12, higher education, and examples of how education systems across the country are using the tools. The site also offers a list of professional development links, including webinars, online workshops, and tutorials, which are primarily centered around Google products and services. The Student Showcases link lists student-created material, such as worldwide panoramas using Google Earth and Sketchup models of homes, towns, and robots.

Apps and software is one thing, but the company’s hardware is also making its way into more schools. Last week, Google announced that three school districts in Iowa, Illinois and South Carolina are using only Google Chromebooks, the Web browser-based laptop, and that hundreds of schools across the country are deploying them in classrooms — a total of 27,000 in the hands of students.

“Students love the tablet. I am not going to hide that from you,” said Diane Gilbert, an English teacher at Kelly Mill Middle School in Blythewood, S.C., who’s taught with tablets in her classroom in a recent CNET article. “My goal is to have students publish their work–create and publish. The [Chromebook] is more alike to a laptop or a desktop in the ability to publish.”

Chromebooks are set up to use the Google Apps and other software found on Google’s Education site.

Google has made it possible for us to have instant information gratification. Just start typing the first letters of your search word and the site intuits your question and offers you the smartest choice of answers.

Seems simple enough. But as quick and facile as the process is, there are ways to be even more efficient, more search-savvy. And it’s our responsibility to teach kids how to find and research information, how to judge its veracity, and when it’s time to ask for a grownup’s help. I spoke to Daniel Russell, Google’s “search anthropologist” in charge of Search Quality and User Happiness (yes, really), who brought to light some important tips you may not have known.

CONTROL F. A deceptively simple tool, the Control F function (or Command F on Macs) allows you to immediately find the word you’re looking for on a page. After you’ve typed in your search, you can jump directly to the word or phrase in the search list. According to Russell, 90 percent of Internet users don’t know this, and spend valuable time scrolling through pages of information trying to find their key word. “They’re being terribly inefficient,” Russell says.

KEEP IT SIMPLE. Use search terms the way you’d like to see them on a Web site. But think of how the author would phrase it. “It’s not about you, it’s about the author,” Russell says. “What would they say and how would they say it? What are some common terms and phrases they’d write? It’s the kind of thing that people over-think and are hyper-analytical about.” Stay on topic and keep it simple.

DEFINE OPERATOR. This has to be one of the best items of Google’s offerings. To learn the definition of a word, just type “Define,” then the word.

ONE MORE SEARCH. It’s one thing to do a quick search for Lady Gaga’s birthday. But for more important questions that have a direct implication on your life, do one more search. Go deeper and find a second corroborating source, just like a journalist would. “We are a credulous society,” Russell says. “When you have something you care about, something you’re going to spend a lot of money on, or an issue with your help, do one extra search. Never single-source anything.”

FIND THE SOURCE. Russell knows first-hand that Web sites can sometimes publish false information. Though we all know how to find contact information for an organization, confirm the phone number, look for the author’s names and trustworthy hallmarks like logos, Russell says “the bad guys know that too. They’re very good at mimicking credible sources of information.” On the site Who.is, searchers can find details about the source: where it’s located, when it was established, and the IP address.

CONFIRM CONTENT. It’s common to find the same phrases and sentences on different sites all over the Web because people duplicate content all the time. To determine the original source of the content, you can look at the date it was written, but that’s also not entirely accurate. When authors edit an article, that changes the posting date. So even if it was originally written in 2005, the date will say 2011 if it was edited last week. Again, here’s when you put on your journalist hat. Trustworthy websites typically have an “errata column” or something like it where mistakes or corrections are posted. Sites where you see strikethroughs (it looks this) publicly show where previously published information has been corrected or stricken. You’ll also see “Updates” at the top of articles, where clarifications are published, which shows the Web site’s intention of providing the most accurate information. “Those idioms were not practicable or doable in pre-technology days,” Russell says. “You have to understand how the practice of writing and publishing is changing.”

LINK OPERATOR. The way Google ranks sites can be confusing. Sometimes even when a site has negative comments or reviews, it still rises to the top of the search list simply because it’s been mentioned the most. When you want to know what other sites are saying about the site you’re searching, type in “Link: www.yourwebsitename.com” and you’ll see all the posts that mention that site. Whether it’s following up on a debatable article or the reputation of an online shop or person, it’s another incredibly useful research tool that didn’t exist in “pre-Web times,” as Russell puts it.

DON’T USE THE + SIGN. It might have negative side effects, Russell says. Adding the + sign will force the search engine to look for only that phrase and may tweak the search in a way you didn’t intend. That said, it’s a useful tool for looking up foreign words or very low-frequency words.

PAY ATTENTION TO “GOOGLE INSTANT.” In most cases, Google’s instant search function, which is fairly new, will accurately predict what you’re searching for and offer suggestions. “Pay attention to it,” Russell says. “You don’t need to keep typing!” And sometimes it’ll help you come up with the right words for your search phrase. It’s all part of tapping into the wisdom of the crowd, he says. “It’s good when you’re stuck in a hard research problem. Like ‘Which kind of hybrid vehicle should I buy?’ might result in ‘hybrid minivans’ or other ideas you might not have known about.'”

SWITCH ON SAFETY MODE. If you’ve got kids in the house, Russell suggests enabling safe search. In your Search Settings, scroll down to SafeSearch Filtering (or use Control F to find it quickly!) and choose what level filter you want to use. You can tailor it to every computer in the house. Google offers all kinds of safe search tips and functions on Google’s Family Safety Center. And what to tell kids if they accidentally stumble upon an inappropriate site? “I always tell my kids the Internet is a big, wide place, and if you find something inappropriate, hit the “back” button,” he says. A teacher he knows tells her class to just instantly close the laptop when they find something objectionable. “It’s an instant signal to the teacher in a K-8 class that something is not right, and it gives the teacher the opportunity to talk about how the student got there, and how to avoid that in the future.” The tactic might not work as well in the high school setting, though, Russell jokes.

FUNCTIONS GALORE. You can use Google to do calculations (just type in “Square root of 99” or “Convert 12 inches to mm”). You can search patents, images, videos, language translations. And even if you can’t remember a Google function, you can easily search it. “I use Google to Google Google,” Russell says. “You don’t have to remember URLs.”

LEFT-HAND SIDE TOOLS. Most people don’t notice these exist, but when you search a topic, a list of useful, interesting tools come up. For example, when you type in War of 1812, on the left hand side, you’ll see “Images,” “Videos,” etc., but below that you’ll see things like “Timeline,” which maps out a time sequence of events around the War of 1812 and links to each of those events. There’s also a dictionary, related searches, and a slew of other helpful links.

Google has made it possible for us to have instant information gratification. Just start typing the first letters of your search word and the site intuits your question and offers you the smartest choice of answers.

Seems simple enough. But as quick and facile as the process is, there are ways to be even more efficient, more search-savvy. And it’s our responsibility to teach kids how to find and research information, how to judge its veracity, and when it’s time to ask for a grownup’s help. I spoke to Daniel Russell, Google’s “search anthropologist” in charge of Search Quality and User Happiness (yes, really), who brought to light some important tips you may not have known.

CONTROL F. A deceptively simple tool, the Control F function (or Command F on Macs) allows you to immediately find the word you’re looking for on a page. After you’ve typed in your search, you can jump directly to the word or phrase in the search list. According to Russell, 90 percent of Internet users don’t know this, and spend valuable time scrolling through pages of information trying to find their key word. “They’re being terribly inefficient,” Russell says.

KEEP IT SIMPLE. Use search terms the way you’d like to see them on a Web site. But think of how the author would phrase it. “It’s not about you, it’s about the author,” Russell says. “What would they say and how would they say it? What are some common terms and phrases they’d write? It’s the kind of thing that people over-think and are hyper-analytical about.” Stay on topic and keep it simple.

DEFINE OPERATOR. This has to be one of the best items of Google’s offerings. To learn the definition of a word, just type “Define,” then the word.

ONE MORE SEARCH. It’s one thing to do a quick search for Lady Gaga’s birthday. But for more important questions that have a direct implication on your life, do one more search. Go deeper and find a second corroborating source, just like a journalist would. “We are a credulous society,” Russell says. “When you have something you care about, something you’re going to spend a lot of money on, or an issue with your help, do one extra search. Never single-source anything.”

FIND THE SOURCE. Russell knows first-hand that Web sites can sometimes publish false information. Though we all know how to find contact information for an organization, confirm the phone number, look for the author’s names and trustworthy hallmarks like logos, Russell says “the bad guys know that too. They’re very good at mimicking credible sources of information.” On the site Who.is, searchers can find details about the source: where it’s located, when it was established, and the IP address.

CONFIRM CONTENT. It’s common to find the same phrases and sentences on different sites all over the Web because people duplicate content all the time. To determine the original source of the content, you can look at the date it was written, but that’s also not entirely accurate. When authors edit an article, that changes the posting date. So even if it was originally written in 2005, the date will say 2011 if it was edited last week. Again, here’s when you put on your journalist hat. Trustworthy websites typically have an “errata column” or something like it where mistakes or corrections are posted. Sites where you see strikethroughs (it looks this) publicly show where previously published information has been corrected or stricken. You’ll also see “Updates” at the top of articles, where clarifications are published, which shows the Web site’s intention of providing the most accurate information. “Those idioms were not practicable or doable in pre-technology days,” Russell says. “You have to understand how the practice of writing and publishing is changing.”

LINK OPERATOR. The way Google ranks sites can be confusing. Sometimes even when a site has negative comments or reviews, it still rises to the top of the search list simply because it’s been mentioned the most. When you want to know what other sites are saying about the site you’re searching, type in “Link: www.yourwebsitename.com” and you’ll see all the posts that mention that site. Whether it’s following up on a debatable article or the reputation of an online shop or person, it’s another incredibly useful research tool that didn’t exist in “pre-Web times,” as Russell puts it.

DON’T USE THE + SIGN. It might have negative side effects, Russell says. Adding the + sign will force the search engine to look for only that phrase and may tweak the search in a way you didn’t intend. That said, it’s a useful tool for looking up foreign words or very low-frequency words.

PAY ATTENTION TO “GOOGLE INSTANT.” In most cases, Google’s instant search function, which is fairly new, will accurately predict what you’re searching for and offer suggestions. “Pay attention to it,” Russell says. “You don’t need to keep typing!” And sometimes it’ll help you come up with the right words for your search phrase. It’s all part of tapping into the wisdom of the crowd, he says. “It’s good when you’re stuck in a hard research problem. Like ‘Which kind of hybrid vehicle should I buy?’ might result in ‘hybrid minivans’ or other ideas you might not have known about.'”

SWITCH ON SAFETY MODE. If you’ve got kids in the house, Russell suggests enabling safe search. In your Search Settings, scroll down to SafeSearch Filtering (or use Control F to find it quickly!) and choose what level filter you want to use. You can tailor it to every computer in the house. Google offers all kinds of safe search tips and functions on Google’s Family Safety Center. And what to tell kids if they accidentally stumble upon an inappropriate site? “I always tell my kids the Internet is a big, wide place, and if you find something inappropriate, hit the “back” button,” he says. A teacher he knows tells her class to just instantly close the laptop when they find something objectionable. “It’s an instant signal to the teacher in a K-8 class that something is not right, and it gives the teacher the opportunity to talk about how the student got there, and how to avoid that in the future.” The tactic might not work as well in the high school setting, though, Russell jokes.

FUNCTIONS GALORE. You can use Google to do calculations (just type in “Square root of 99” or “Convert 12 inches to mm”). You can search patents, images, videos, language translations. And even if you can’t remember a Google function, you can easily search it. “I use Google to Google Google,” Russell says. “You don’t have to remember URLs.”

LEFT-HAND SIDE TOOLS. Most people don’t notice these exist, but when you search a topic, a list of useful, interesting tools come up. For example, when you type in War of 1812, on the left hand side, you’ll see “Images,” “Videos,” etc., but below that you’ll see things like “Timeline,” which maps out a time sequence of events around the War of 1812 and links to each of those events. There’s also a dictionary, related searches, and a slew of other helpful links.

]]>https://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2011/09/02/cracking-the-code-to-the-best-google-search/feed/191501688015904You don't need to know computer programming to do a smart search.Back to School with Google Chromebookshttps://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2011/08/25/back-to-school-with-google-chromebooks/
https://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2011/08/25/back-to-school-with-google-chromebooks/#commentsThu, 25 Aug 2011 21:00:08 +0000http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/?p=14803Continue reading Back to School with Google Chromebooks→]]>Yesterday was the first day of school for Grace Lutheran School in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Among the various tasks that the students had to accomplish today were establishing their Google accounts and setting up their new Chromebooks. There’s already a certain excitement that comes with a new school year, but according to principal Peter Iles, the students’ reaction to the Chromebooks was “pretty magical.” Several told him it was their favorite part of the day and the thing they were most looking forward to using for the rest of the academic year. That’s a ringing endorsement for Google’s new venture into hardware, sure, but it’s also a great attitude to start the school year.

Grace Lutheran is one of many schools that is taking advantage of the new Chromebooks for Education program, announced earlier this summer at Google I/O. For $20 per month per device, schools can rent the netbook-like, Web-only devices. There have been lots of criticisms of the Chromebooks from tech bloggers — they are underpowered computers for the price. But according to Iles, Chromebooks were the logical choice for his school.

Critics of Chromebooks have claimed that the Web just isn’t ready for people to rely solely on cloud-based apps, but some schools are proving otherwise.

The Grace Lutheran computer lab was woefully out-of-date. The machines were six or seven years old. To refresh the lab with new desktop computers would have cost around $35,000, not including all the software and licensing. To replace the old desktops with laptops would have cost about $15,000, again plus software costs, according to Iles. Instead, he opted to go with the Chromebooks — 20 of them will run his school about $14,000. But as the Chromebooks are rented, not purchased, that’s a monthly bill, and Iles said that it was far easier for the school to handle a small monthly payment than come up with a big chunk of money at once.

And just as importantly, perhaps, the Chromebooks were easier for Iles to administer and support. He’s the principal, the seventh and eighth grade teacher, and the school’s head of technology. He describes himself as “pretty computer savvy,” but he confesses he just couldn’t maintain a server environment. With Chromebooks plus Google Apps for Education, he doesn’t have to.

In contrast, the staff at The Fessenden School in West Newton, Massachusetts operate with a bigger budget and their school’s new Chromebooks will supplement rather than replace exisiting Macbooks and desktops. But the argument for the ease-of-use on the end of IT administration is the same: with Chromebooks, as with Google Apps for Education, there’s no need to handle software and OS updates on each individual machine. There’s no need to run a server on the premises.

The focus instead can be on using the computers for teaching and for learning. Indeed, the conversations I had with Chromebooks users today quickly became about Google Apps for Education and for the collaboration that the productivity suite enables for teachers and students.

THE FUTURE OF EDUCATION IS ON THE WEB

Some critics of Chromebooks have claimed that the Web just isn’t ready for people to rely solely on cloud-based apps, the schools I spoke to today disagreed. Some of the teachers at The Fessenden School might not be ready, Curt Paine, the school’s director of technology joked, but the students definitely are. And so are the Web apps. “The Web is already where we go for great educational content,” says Paine, and the apps — both Google Apps for Education and others — are getting “more and more powerful.”

There are things that Chromebooks can’t do, of course. The schools say they are eager for Google to implement offline Apps, as it’s promised to do by summer’s end. They said that high-end video and photo editing desktop software is still superior to Web-based versions. The Chromebooks don’t work with The Fessenden School’s interactive whiteboards, and the USB interface isn’t adequate for uploading things like photos.

But these drawbacks are all minor, the educators I spoke with today said, compared to the benefits that the Chromebooks would afford their schools: ease-of-use for students and staff, administrative controls to restrict what students can download in terms of extensions and apps, storage in and reliance on the cloud. The cloud, says Paine, is clearly “the way we want to go.” It’s the future for software and for schools, the educators I talked to today all insisted.

Pointing to the older model of desktop computing — the IT administration that came with it and the lack of customer support from other computer vendors, Grace Lutheran principal Iles says, “I don’t ever want to go back.”

Disrupting the entrenched education system is daunting. There are 7.2 million teachers in the U.S., 76 million students, and more than 98,000 public schools, according to a government census (as of 2008).

So what’s the most effective way to unshackle the current archaic system from ineffective tactics that no longer work in the digital age?

Google, the world’s go-to for answers, has an idea for the most impactful place to start. Last week, the company’s educational overseers organized the Google Faculty Institute, to which they invited the faculty from California State University (CSU) schools of education. The mission: to show those who teach teachers the most effective, useful, and helpful digital tools.

Why the focus on CSU teachers? Simple math — 60% of teachers in California and 10% of teachers in the U.S. — are trained through the CSU system.

“You get the attention of hundreds of these faculty members, then you make a real change in California.”

“We want to make California a model for the rest of the country,” said Maggie Johnson, director of education and university relations for Google. “We wanted to find a mechanism for talking about education technology and all the ways of using it in transformational ways — not just ways to support teaching as it’s always been done.”

Over the course of three days, the 39 attendees — mostly faculty who teach at the CSU schools of education — were tasked with coming up with proposals that would demonstrate the use of technology in new and inventive ways. They had to show how the proposal could be scaled and how it could go viral. For its part, in addition to hosting the event and providing experts and resources at the workshop, Google will donate $20,000 to each group, which has six to nine months to implement their ideas.

Here’s what they came up with:

The Math of Khan: Documenting, testing and disseminating the process by which a teacher can flip their classroom using Khan Academy videos.

Making Teachers ‘Appy’: Encouraging a “maker” philosophy with pre-service educators (teachers-in-training) by teaching introduction to programming in an educational technology course.

Birds-Eye Detective: Teaching pre-server educators how to use Google Earth, Maps and fusion tables in the context of project-based K-12 instruction.

Team-Teaching Classroom Innovation: Identifying a large number of pre-service teacher pairs to develop technology-rich science and math modules, test those modules in their classrooms and share with each other.

Transforming STEM Educators: Delivering short workshops on how to use technology to do formative assessment, while saving faculty significant time.

Examining Climate Change: An integrative math/science/technology approach to learning about climate change by developing a module for a methods course showing the power of technology in the context on relevant issues and to address misconceptions.

For these educators of educators, learning the tools of the trade for themselves deepened their understanding of how they can be taught to their students, and in turn used more fluidly in classrooms across California.

“They now understand the ability to manage some of these tools that can make teaching more fruitful and more exciting,” said Jaimie Tasap, Google senior education manager.

Though there were “bumps in the road,” namely legitimate obstacles that faculty would face in taking these ideas back to school to implement, Johnson said she’s confident they’ll follow through.

“We want them to influence the rest of the faculty at their schools,” she said. “You get the attention of hundreds of these faculty members, then you make a real change in California.”

How can learning to blog make a lasting impact on a 12-year-old boy living in a rough, East Oakland neighborhood?

In the second installment of MindShift’s My Education series, which examines whether technology in learning can have a lasting impact on low-income kids through the perspective of one child, the question focuses on Makeal Surrell, a sweet-natured kid who lives with his two sisters and his aunt/guardian a few blocks from Elmhurst Community Prep (ECP) middle school.

Last year, Makeal missed more than 20 days of school, partly due to being sick from asthma. But since he started an after-school blogging apprenticeship with Google, through the Citizen Schools enrichment program, his absences have declined. During the spring semester, Makeal and his classmates were bussed once a week to the Google offices in San Francisco, where they were taught by Google employees all about blogging. By the end of the semester, Makeal had published his own blog about his favorite subject: skateboarding.

Or at least a little about skateboarding. During the spring semester, Makeal published eight posts consisting of mostly videos, photos, and a couple of short written entries. And though he started with three skateboarding-related posts, he moved onto other subjects that interested him: movie reviews and rap videos.

And that was the point — to get Makeal and his classmates a medium for their self-expression, as they learn technical skills like how to create a blog and upload content.

“The idea is to give them confidence as they move through school and potentially enter the workplace.”

“The educational environments … that have most impact will be the ones that create opportunities for kids to create digital media literacies that we all recognize as important and that have social implications, educational implications and civic implications, as well,” said S. Craig Watkins, author of The Young and the Digital in a recent interview. “So we have to equip kids with skills that help them not just to consume, but to become architects of their information environment.”

At ECP, Makeal and his classmates attend an after-school enrichment program.

And for low-income kids like Makeal, who are living under difficult circumstances by anyone’s standards, what might be considered a simple task like blogging can actually have an impact on what Watkins refers to as “their disposition towards learning and as learners.”

And the fact that Makeal was given free rein to choose the topic of his blog made the experience more meaningful. Digital media expert Mimi Ito puts it this way:

“[The freedom to choose] has the potential to ignite a transformative identity shift,” she said. “For kids who are alienated from mainstream structures of schooling, they don’t feel like they have choices in their own identity and trajectory, so for them to be trusted to choose and have an interest is important.”

Anna Wilson, a Google employee who was part of the after-school apprenticeship program and taught ECP kids how to blog, said she hopes the experience will help Makeal in the long run.

Makael, with his sister and his aunt, who's also his guardian.

“We wanted to show them that this was not just a viable revenue stream with a career — because what we do at Google is advertising, we monetize the Web — but also that it could be something very personal, that you only share with close friends and family, sort of like an online diary,” she said. “The idea is to give them confidence as they move through school and potentially enter the workplace.”

Makeal says he may not be returning to ECP next fall, depending on his family circumstances, and if so, may not enroll in another after-school enrichment program. But the hope is that his blogging experience will give him a sense of lasting confidence that will stay with him wherever he ends up.

[Video co-produced with Matthew Williams.]

RESOURCES

]]>https://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2011/07/28/can-learning-how-to-blog-change-makeals-life/feed/714136workshopAt ECP, Makeal and his classmates attend an after-school enrichment program.Screen-shot-2011-07-27-at-1.29.58-PMMakael, with his sister and his aunt, who's also his guardian.myEd_square